We’ve recent­ly learned from SAP that near­ly 12,000 busi­ness­es have pur­chased SAP S/4HANA licens­es. We know that most have not gone live yet, and we also know that there are still many more that do not have active migra­tion plans in place yet.
 

Accord­ing to the ASUG 2019 State of the Com­mu­ni­ty Study, more than half of ASUG mem­bers have plans to imple­ment SAP S/4HANA in the future, but they have held back because of pri­or­i­ti­za­tion, lack of resources, wait­ing for the prod­uct to mature, or need­ing to jus­ti­fy the move. It’s not that com­pa­nies don’t want to get there — it’s that they just need some guid­ance and resources to help.

Tak­ing the First Steps to SAP S/4HANA

To address that need, ASUG News has put togeth­er a basic list of resources avail­able through SAP that might help those who are think­ing about mak­ing the move. This is by no means a com­plete list, but it should help get the ball rolling.

The first step in mov­ing to SAP S/4HANA is to build a busi­ness case. If you can’t show your C‑suite both the IT and busi­ness ben­e­fits, chances are your pro­pos­al will be dead on arrival. But where do you begin work­ing on your busi­ness case and how do you pre­pare it to present to your decision-makers?

We’ve learned from the ASUG Under­cov­er CIO that the most impor­tant fac­tor in build­ing a busi­ness case is this: Your busi­ness case is not about upgrad­ing to the newest tech­nol­o­gy. Your busi­ness case is about solv­ing exist­ing busi­ness issues in a new and improved way. You need to first under­stand your exist­ing busi­ness issues and then fig­ure out how SAP S/4HANA will help solve those challenges.

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Build­ing Your SAP S/4HANA Busi­ness Case

To help ana­lyze your busi­ness and tech­ni­cal envi­ron­ment, SAP offers a num­ber of free tools and ser­vices, includ­ing Busi­ness Sce­nario Rec­om­men­da­tions, SAP Inno­va­tion Opti­miza­tion Pathfind­er, SAP S/4HANA Val­ue Advi­sor, and SAP Trans­for­ma­tion Nav­i­ga­tor.

• The Busi­ness Sce­nario Rec­om­men­da­tions (BSR) is a free report based on SAP ECC 6 usage. With that real-world infor­ma­tion, BSR iden­ti­fies trans­ac­tions that would ben­e­fit most from SAP S/4HANA. It also com­pares your ERP usage to peers in the indus­try (anony­mous­ly). This is the most detailed and per­son­al­ized way to begin a con­ver­sa­tion with busi­ness users about SAP S/4HANA.
• The SAP Inno­va­tion Opti­miza­tion Pathfind­er tool is designed to help eval­u­ate your over­all prod­uct road map. It helps a busi­ness to explore soft­ware inno­va­tions fil­tered by indus­try, Line-of-Busi­ness (LoB), and tech­nol­o­gy. This tool helps to gain a bet­ter under­stand­ing of what SAP S/4HANA does and how it has improved over old­er ERP versions.
• The SAP S/4HANA Val­ue Advi­sor tool is designed to pro­vide a quick and sim­ple way to mea­sure the poten­tial val­ue of SAP S/4HANA for any busi­ness. Cus­tomers can eval­u­ate 35 val­ue dri­vers to nar­row down the pos­si­bil­i­ties through a short sequence of ques­tions and then fur­ther refine them by indus­try and LoB.
• The SAP Trans­for­ma­tion Nav­i­ga­tor pro­vides road maps to help gain enter­prise buy-in around key deci­sions includ­ing what you need to do, how you are going to do it, and how long it should take.

It’s Time to Get Ready for SAP S/4HANA

If you’re run­ning on an SAP ECC 6.0 sys­tem, the SAP Readi­ness Check tool helps your IT depart­ment ana­lyze the readi­ness of the company’s exist­ing system.

The report answers ques­tions such as:

• How big should the SAP HANA data­base be?
• What SAP Fiori appli­ca­tions are rel­e­vant to my busi­ness users?
• Are my add-ons com­pat­i­ble with SAP S/4HANA?
• Which of my exist­ing busi­ness func­tions or trans­ac­tions will change as a result of mov­ing to SAP S/4HANA?
• Will my cus­tom code objects work with SAP S/4HANA?

The tool helps to answer all the ques­tions above and more. You can ana­lyze the state of your cur­rent process­es to deter­mine any cleanup require­ments before migrat­ing to SAP S/4HANA. You can view new and updat­ed data structures/​architectures in SAP S/4HANA to deter­mine if they are rel­e­vant to your process­es. You also can ana­lyze the impact of cus­tom code by know­ing which SAP objects are now dif­fer­ent or no longer exist in SAP S/4HANA.

Start the Move to SAP S/4HANA with Guidance

SAP recent­ly launched its SAP S/4HANA Move­ment pro­gram, designed to help cus­tomers tran­si­tion into an intel­li­gent enter­prise seam­less­ly with pack­aged tools and ser­vices. One of those ser­vices, the SAP S/4HANA Adop­tion Starter Engage­ment pro­gram pro­vides an expert-guid­ed expe­ri­ence for struc­tur­ing, orga­niz­ing, and build­ing your plan for mov­ing to an SAP S/4HANA land­scape. Cus­tomers have access to deci­sion-mak­ing tools and SAP cus­tomer peer-to-peer knowl­edge shar­ing and net­work­ing on a plat­form that com­bines a vir­tu­al class­room with self-guid­ed steps.

By the end of this exer­cise, cus­tomers will receive pre­scrip­tive guid­ance on how to start their jour­neys to SAP S/4HANA, define the ROI they expect to achieve, choose the right deploy­ment options for their busi­ness­es, sim­pli­fy their dig­i­tal oper­a­tions, and bet­ter inter­pret the val­ue of their data to help make bet­ter busi­ness deci­sions in the future. This ser­vice is avail­able com­pli­men­ta­ry to any cus­tomer who has an SAP Sup­port contract.

Once a cus­tomer has com­plet­ed the steps to SAP S/4HANA Adop­tion Starter Engage­ment pro­gram, they can turn to SAP Dig­i­tal Busi­ness Ser­vices to help them achieve smoother tran­si­tions. This ser­vice include access to SAP S/4HANA Val­ue Dis­cov­ery Engage­ment, which assists with the prepa­ra­tion process; SAP Val­ue Assur­ance, which helps bring effi­cien­cy and risk reduc­tion to all project phas­es; SAP Advanced Deploy­ment, which pro­vides cus­tomers with access to a turnkey, SAP-led imple­men­ta­tion option to sim­ply and sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly deploy SAP S/4HANA; and SAP Mod­el Com­pa­ny, which pro­vides a pre­con­fig­ured, ready-to-run ref­er­ence solu­tion with busi­ness con­tent and engi­neered ser­vices for mul­ti­ple indus­tries and LoBs.

Learn to Run on SAP S/4HANA

ASUG News recent­ly shared tips on how to avoid an SAP S/4HANA imple­men­ta­tion dis­as­ter. We also dis­cussed the dif­fer­ent fla­vors of SAP S/4HANA and how to pick the right one for you. But beyond know­ing how to get there and how to avoid imple­men­ta­tion fail­ures, you’ll want to know how to best run on an SAP S/4HANA sys­tem once you’ve suc­cess­ful­ly made the move. You can vis­it the SAP S/4HANA Road Map resource page, which serves as an offi­cial list of the fea­tures that are includ­ed in or planned for future releas­es. Cus­tomers can scroll through webi­na­rs on the lat­est SAP solu­tions and learn how to best use them for their busi­ness. You also can vis­it the Release High­lights page to find infor­ma­tion on new fea­tures, func­tions, and high­lights in the lat­est release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

Dis­cov­er more SAP S/4HANA Resources with the Cloud ERP and SAP S/4HANA Com­mu­ni­ty Resource Center.